Opioids, also known as opioid agonists, are a group of drugs that exhibit opium or morphine-like properties. The opioids are employed primarily as moderate to strong analgesics, but have many other pharmacological effects as well, including drowsiness, respiratory depression, changes in mood and mental clouding without a resulting loss of consciousness. Opioids act as agonists, interacting with stereospecific and saturable binding sites in the brain and other tissues. Endogenous opioid-like peptides are present particularly in areas of the central nervous system that are presumed to be related to the perception of pain; to movement, mood and behavior, and to the regulation of neuroendocrinological functions. Opium contains more than twenty distinct alkaloids. Morphine, codeine and papaverine are included in this group.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the use of pure alkaloids such as morphine rather than crude opium preparations began to spread throughout the medical world. Parenteral use of morphine tended to produce a more severe variety of compulsive drug use than crude opium preparations. The problem of addiction to opioids stimulated a search for potent analgesics that would be free of the potential to produce addiction. By 1967, researchers had concluded that the complex interactions among morphine-like drugs, antagonists, and what was then called “mixed agonist-antagonist” could best be explained by postulating the existence of more than one type of receptor for opioids and related drugs. With the advent of new totally synthetic entities with morphine-like actions, the term “opioid” was generally retained as a generic designation for all exogenous substances that bind stereo-specifically to any of several subspecies of opioid receptors and produce agonist actions. While this greater understanding advanced the science of pharmacology, it did not result in the development of an analgesic opioid free of abuse potential.
The potential for the development of tolerance and physical dependence with repeated opioid use is a characteristic feature of all the opioid drugs, and the possibility of developing psychological dependence (i.e., addiction) is one of the major concerns in the use of the treatment of pain with opioids, even though iatrogenic addiction is rare. Another major concern associated with the use of opioids is the diversion of these drugs from the patient in pain to another (non-patient) for illicit purposes, e.g., to an addict.
The overall abuse potential of an opioid is not established by any one single factor. Instead, there is a composite of factors, including, the capacity of the drug to produce the kind of physical dependence in which drug withdrawal causes sufficient distress to bring about drug-seeking behavior; the ability to suppress withdrawal symptoms caused by withdrawal from other agents; the degree to which it induces euphoria similar to that produced by morphine and other opioids; the patterns of toxicity that occur when the drug is dosed above its normal therapeutic range; and physical characteristics of the drugs such as water solubility. Such physical characteristics may determine whether the drug is likely to be abused by the parenteral route.
In the United States, the effort to control the compulsive drug user includes efforts to control drug availability by placing restrictions on the use of opioids in the treatment of pain of compulsive drug users. In practice, the physician is often faced with a choice of administering potent opioid analgesics even to persons who seem predisposed to develop psychological dependence, i.e., addiction, on such drugs. In view of this problem, it has been recommended that these patients should not be given an opioid when another drug without a potential for abuse will suffice; and further that these patients should not be provided with a dosage form which may be parenterally abused and should only be given a few days' supply at any one time.
At least three basic patterns of opioid use and dependence have been identified. The first involves individuals whose drug use begins in the context of medical treatment and who obtain their initial supplies through legitimate sources, e.g., physicians. Another pattern begins with experimental or “recreational” drug use and progresses to more intensive use. A third pattern involves users who begin in one or another of the preceding patterns, but later switch to oral opioids such as methadone, obtained from licensed addiction treatment programs.
Tolerance refers to the need to increase the dose of opioid over a period of time in order to achieve the same level of analgesia or euphoria, or the observation that repeated administration of the same dose results in decreased analgesia, euphoria, or other opioid effects. It has been found that a remarkable degree of tolerance develops to the respiratory depressant, analgesic, sedative, emetic and euphorigenic effects of opioids. However, the rate at which this tolerance may develop in either an addict or in a patient requiring treatment of pain depends on the pattern of use. If the opioid is used frequently, it may be necessary to increase the dose. Tolerance does not develop equally or at the same rate to all the effects of opioids, and even users who are highly tolerant to respiratory depressant effects continue to exhibit miosis and constipation. Tolerance to opioids largely disappears when the withdrawal syndrome has been completed.
Physical dependence may develop upon repeated administrations or extended use of opioids. Physical dependence is gradually manifested after stopping opioid use or is precipitously manifested (e.g., within a few minutes) after administration of a narcotic antagonist (referred to “precipitated withdrawal”). Depending upon the drug to which dependence has been established and the duration of use and dose, symptoms of withdrawal vary in number and kind, duration and severity. The most common symptoms of the withdrawal syndrome include anorexia, weight loss, pupillary dilation, chills alternating with excessive sweating, abdominal cramps, nausea, vomiting, muscle spasms, hyperirritability, lacrimation, rinorrhea, goose flesh and increased heart rate. Natural abstinence syndromes typically begin to occur 24-48 hours after the last dose, reach maximum intensity about the third day and may not begin to decrease until the third week. Precipitated abstinence syndromes produced by administration of an opioid antagonist vary in intensity and duration with the dose and the specific antagonist, but generally vary from a few minutes to several hours in length.
Psychological dependence (i.e., addiction) on opioids is characterized by drug-seeking behavior directed toward achieving euphoria and escape from, e.g., psychosocioeconomic pressures. An addict will continue to administer opioids for non-medicinal purposes and in the face of self-harm.
There have previously been attempts in the art to control the abuse potential associated with opioid analgesics. For example, the combination of pentazocine and naloxone has been utilized in tablets available in the United States, commercially available as Talwin® Nx from Sanofi-Winthrop. Talwin® Nx contains pentazocine hydrochloride equivalent to 50 mg base and naloxone hydrochloride equivalent to 0.5 mg base. Talwin® Nx is indicated for the relief of moderate to severe pain. The amount of naloxone present in this combination has low activity when taken orally, and minimally interferes with the pharmacologic action of pentazocine. However, this amount of naloxone given parenterally has profound antagonistic action to narcotic analgesics. Thus, the inclusion of naloxone is intended to curb a form of misuse of oral pentazocine which occurs when the dosage form is solubilized and injected. Therefore, this dosage has lower potential for parenteral misuse than previous oral pentazocine formulations. However, it is still subject to patient misuse and abuse by the oral route, for example, by the patient taking multiple doses at once. A fixed combination therapy comprising tilidine (50 mg) and naloxone (4 mg) has been available in Germany for the management of severe pain since 1978 (Valoron®N, Goedecke). The rationale for the combination of these drugs is effective pain relief and the prevention of tilidine addiction through naloxone-induced antagonisms at the morphine receptor. A fixed combination of buprenorphine and naloxone was introduced in 1991 in New Zealand (Temgesic® Nx, Reckitt & Colman) for the treatment of pain.